


Let Me Find You

by NuMo



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: AU based on another fic, F/F, letting go and letting someone find their way back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24733405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NuMo/pseuds/NuMo
Summary: This is a continuation ofst_aurafina'swonderful work"Give Us Those Nice Bright Colours", which I re-discovered while reading B&W fic sorted by old. It got me thinking on how we think about/tell stories about redemption and saving people and the like, and that thinking led to this. I hope that's alright!
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Comments: 21
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).



The Regents put Myka on probation, which is funny, considering.

It’s not like Myka is going to break another H.G. Wells out of prison anytime soon, after all.

Still, though, she is back at her job, and all the feathers she’s ruffled slowly start to settle. There’s a new guy, Steve Jinks, who brings a very Zen attitude to the team; maybe that has something to do with it. Teasing him, testing his boundaries, is something that distracts Pete from how much Myka’s betrayal has hurt him, and that’s something to be grateful for. 

Pete doesn’t know why Myka did what she did. As astute as he is in other things, he really hasn’t cottoned on to what had gone on between Myka and Helena – not that there had been all that much to cotton on to, but still. 

Myka isn’t sure if she should be happy for it or not. His teasing would be god-awful, she knows, but she’s come to _like_ his teasing. Being teased by Pete Lattimer has become her normal, and not being teased for _this_ – makes it not-normal. Is a barrier between them, even if he doesn’t know it’s there. And Myka doesn’t want barriers between her and Pete, not that kind anyway. It feels a bit like lying by omission, and she really, _really_ doesn’t want to lie to him anymore, or for him to think she’s lying to him. 

But it is also a good thing that this thing between Helena and her, whatever it actually is or was or – a thought for the very small hours of the night – might turn out to be, that this thing is Myka’s thing only, nobody else’s to make weird remarks over. Because sometimes she doesn’t even know what kind of thing it is, what kind of thing it was, or if it even was a thing – you know, _that_ kind of thing.

One thing she knows: Helena had promised to find her way back to Myka. ‘Let me come to you. I promise I will’, that’s what she had said, in Sydney, two months ago now. Myka doesn’t need a pebbled-up recording of this to put in her shoe; her memory serves. She can, and does, remember everything about that moment; from the warmth of the sun on her skin (unseasonable to her, but obviously not to an Australian January) to the scent of their respective foodstuffs (tofu is _not_ fraudulent) to the low murmur of the street crowd around them to the feel of her hand being pressed to Helena’s cheek by Helena’s hand.

Myka clings to that memory, clear and bright like a View-Master diorama (if with more accurate colors), as she snags, tags and bags, as she stays good and apologizes and doesn’t break another H.G. Wells out of prison. 

-_-_-

Months go by. Myka receives a letter, one year to the day after she returned, informing her that her state of probation is over. The letter surprises her a little; she wouldn’t have thought that the Regents forgive so quickly, even if Pete and Claudia and Artie have told her often enough that they are all back to trusting her completely. The date, the fact that it’s been a year, does not surprise her at all; she can read a calendar, after all. 

It does make her wonder what Helena is up to. If she is being a good person, if she has found whatever she needed to find – herself, peace, sense, meaning, her place in this world, perhaps even happiness. If Myka’s list has helped her at all, perhaps, maybe. Her way back to Myka she obviously hasn’t found, and Myka’s stubbornness that makes her tack a ‘yet’ on the end of that statement every time she thinks it is beginning to waver. 

Maybe whatever Helena has found out there is better than what she could have here. 

And if it is, Myka tells herself with the same stubbornness, then that’s a good thing. Helena deserves good things. That was the whole point of springing her out, wasn’t it – to give Helena a chance to find her own way to healing instead of locking her up. The list Myka gave her was supposed to be just a bit of a leg-up, not a shackle binding Helena Wells to Myka Bering. That’s the last thing Myka wants it to be.

It’d been in Okinawa that Myka had realized that she, Myka Bering, was woefully inadequate to help Helena. Oh, she could rescue Helena, from drowning, from prison, from doing something she didn’t really want to do like destroying civilization, but help?

And even if she were, she isn’t sure Helena would want that help. From her. 

That realization had also happened in Okinawa.

It is a brittle thing still, that realization, after all these months. Spiky and sharp and for all its brittleness very unwilling to dissolve. 

Myka only ever wanted to help Helena, but she isn’t equipped, and she sent Helena away when that realization was still fresh and now it’s a year later and Helena isn’t back. 

It’s selfish to think that Helena’s healing should lead her back to Myka, isn’t it? To hope for it? To hope that, every now and then, Helena looks at lines hastily scribbled on paper that was balled up, trodden on, drenched, given – looks at them and sees something in them? Remembers the person who wrote them?

For all that she kissed Myka in the desert, for all the looks they exchanged during all their time together – if Helena now has found something better, something that’s more right for her than the Warehouse and one agent in it: wouldn’t that be something to hope for when you really care about someone? 

Sometimes Myka wants to ask these questions of someone, rather than just mull them over in her head, but she didn’t talk to anyone back then – how can she talk to anyone now, now that they’ve all forgiven and forgotten?

‘If you love somebody, let them go,’ isn’t that the quote? And then something about if it’s meant to be, they’ll stay with you, or return to you, or something. Myka has heard and seen and read too many variants of the statement, and doesn’t know which one is the actual quote, if it even is a quote. It seems too much of a truism, and anyway, ‘the waiting is always the hardest part’ is a truism too, isn’t it? 

If only she knew for sure that she is actually waiting, and not refusing to adapt to a new normal, one where she is a Warehouse agent and Helena is not.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s summer, blistering, sweltering summer. Myka is at the dining table finishing the paperwork from her last retrieval, and when there’s the sound of car tires in the driveway, her assumption is that it’s Leena returning from doing the week’s grocery shopping, so she resolves to finish reading over this last form before getting up to help Leena carry. Nobody else is here; Pete and Steve are out on retrieval, Artie and Claudia are working in the Warehouse on something or other.

“Hello, Myka.”

That isn’t Leena’s voice. 

Myka’s pen drops from her fingers with a clatter. For a moment, she doesn’t dare to look up to confirm she’s heard right, but then she shakes herself out of it. She’s a trained agent, for crying out loud. 

Helena is standing under the arch that separates the dining room from the hallway, as if she’s hesitant to come in further. 

She looks… the same, only more solid somehow. Hesitant, but solid. No prison jumpsuit, no stolen businesswoman power suit: she’s back in her fitted pants, button up, vest standard, and Myka briefly wonders if this is the same pale blue shirt that-

She hasn’t said anything yet, she suddenly realizes, and goes, “Hi,” and is immediately annoyed at herself for how inane it sounds. “You’re…” back? Here? How to finish that sentence? 

“How have you been?” Helena asks, and, yeah Myka, _manners_. 

“Good,” she says and swallows, “good. They let me back in,” she adds, gesturing around the room and, again, immediately berating herself. Surely Helena can see that for herself.

“I had no doubt of that, as you’ll remember,” Helena says, and why is it only Myka who’s flustered? 

“So, um, how are you?” Myka twists her fingers around the pen to keep from rubbing the back of her neck. She knows it’d be replacement activity, and she knows Helena would know it too. 

Helena’s lips twitch into a small smile. “I am well,” she says, and for a moment Myka might believe that Helena is, indeed, just as flustered behind her façade of manners and button-ups, because that smile is gone as soon as it came. 

Myka feels a thousand questions burning on her tongue, but she bites them all back; Helena isn’t here to be interrogated, surely the Regents did that before they allowed her- hang on. “Are you here… um, officially?”

“Oh yes,” Helena is quick to reply, quick to nod her head, slightly more vigorous than warranted. “Sanctioned and authorized. I… am considering asking for re-instatement, but-” 

And then there are tires in the driveway again, and Helena stops talking and turns around, and Myka explains about Leena and grocery shopping and how they should help Leena carry things, and then _Pete_ is back and hungry and explains that Steve went on ahead to the Warehouse to drop the snagged artifact-

The usual mayhem, in short, plus the additional mayhem of Helena being back and Pete being curious, Artie being suspicious, Claudia being overjoyed, Steve waiting to be introduced, and Leena trying to make sure Helena has some space to breathe in.

And Myka finding herself at the edge of it all, looking in from the outside as it were – if not physically, then in how it feels for her. 

Everyone seems content to accept Helena back among them as a fact of life – except Artie, but his non-acceptance is par for the course, just part of the normal way of things. 

To Myka, the whole thing feels so far on the other side of normal she can’t bear it. She barely eats at dinner, and when Pete suggests a celebratory showing of War of the Worlds, she excuses herself and heads up to her room. The last sight she catches is Helena laughing in delight at some story Claudia is telling her, and suddenly Myka is angry.

 _She_ didn’t get to laugh at stories of Claudia’s antics when she came back.

She was met with hurt looks from Pete, incredulous (and hurt) looks from Claudia, and the usual from Artie and Leena: suspicious brusqueness from one, and calm acceptance from the other. She had to _work_ to get back in everyone’s good graces, for _months_ , and now Helena just waltzes in here and everything is _fine?_

At home, it used to be that Tracy would get, at most, a telling-off for doing something that Myka would get grounded for a month for, and now it’s the same thing only that Helena tried to end civilization and all Myka did was trying to do right by her. 

Myka feels hot tears shoot into her eyes and that makes her even angrier. She hates when her body does that, hates it with a passion. 

This is not how she’d envisioned Helena coming back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a re-telling/adaptation of the episode Past Imperfect.

Myka avoids Helena the next day, and Helena seems to be content to avoid Myka right back, but then the Smoking Railroad Spikes ping on Artie’s radar in the evening, and Helena begs to be allowed to retrieve them – she loves all things railroad; it’s no surprise – begs to be allowed to prove herself, and Artie shoves the file into Myka’s hands, telling her to go with and keep Wells in check.

It’s a long drive to Denver, and very hard to avoid someone in the passenger seat. 

Easier when that someone goes to sleep minutes after setting out – on the one hand, it suits Myka fine to not have to talk; on the other, it rankles that Helena seems to think that this is an appropriate way to spend the time; on the third, of course it is – it is sensible. This way she’ll be a fresh driver when Myka gets too tired.

Still. 

Myka is still angry, and exasperated at how Helena can just _sleep_.

Helena wakes when they pass into Nebraska. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive for a bit?” she asks. “It’s no bother, and I assure you I’ve adapted to driving on this side of the road again.”

“It’s fine,” Myka says. At least with the wheel in her hands she has something to do, something to concentrate on. 

“It is also eleven thirty-four at night. Why don’t we find a place to sleep somewhere, and get there fresh and awake?”

Myka grits her teeth. Helena has a point, but things being as they are it’s a bit hard to admit that right now. A moment later, though, as her eyes begin to water from straining to keep them open, she realizes that this kind of stubbornness is how missions fail and agents get killed. They pass a sign for a rest stop, five miles to go, and she nods at it. “I’ll pull over there and get some coffee.” It’s the best compromise she can offer, and from the corner of her eyes, she sees Helena nod.

Five miles have never felt so long. There are at least two instances of Myka almost nodding off, so when she pulls into the rest stop, she turns off the car and looks at Helena and says, “I think you better drive, if you’re really up to it.” She can be this kind of person. She _needs_ to be this kind of person; microsleep is a killer just as much as bullets are.

Denver will never not make her think of bullets and Sam’s lifeless eyes.

“It’s afternoon for you anyway, isn’t it?” she adds, trying to think of other things, like the time difference between Nebraska and Australia.

Helena wrinkles her brows. “Six in the morning, if I’m not mistaken,” she says. “But my nap was sufficient. I am good to go.”

“Six in the morning?” That’s not Australia time.

“Greenwich Mean plus summer time,” Helena explains. “I’ve been in Wales for the past year and a bit.”

Myka blinks. Her thoughts feel too sluggish for this. She really needs to sleep. She also really wants to know why the hell Helena was in actual Wales and not New South Wales. “Oh,” she brings out.

“Myka, I really do think – and please don’t take umbrage at this – you should try to sleep for a bit,” Helena says. “I promise I will explain all of this, later, alright?”

Myka takes a deep breath, which morphs into a yawn. “Alright,” she says. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Helena says, and snaps off her seat belt. 

Myka wakes at they turn from 88 onto I-25, just inside Montana. It’s three in the morning; the navigation system shows their ETA in Denver for five thirty. “You still good?” she asks Helena muzzily; her mouth tastes stale and there’s a crick in her neck.

“I am. By all means go on sleeping,” she hears Helena say.

“Wake me half an hour before we get there?”

“Of course.”

It’s a quarter to five when Helena does wake Myka up; she’s made good time, but then it is the dead of night, that’s only to be expected. “Would you like to get breakfast somewhere?”

“Coffee, anyway,” Myka says through a yawn. If she eats anything much now, she’ll fall asleep again, she knows. 

Two hour later, she’s glad there isn’t anything in her stomach, because she just saw _Leo fucking Bock_ and he got away from her again. Because Helena had been too clumsy to snag the Spikes without nearly getting offed by them. ‘Helena’ and ‘clumsy’ are two words that don’t belong in a non-negated sentence together, but here they are, and Bock is not, and Myka’s teeth are clenched again. 

Helena did just drive more than three hundred miles on the power of a nap. It’s okay to be clumsy after that. The thought is small, but cuts through her anger as effectively as the Spikes cut through Helena’s glove. 

So Myka takes a deep breath, does her best to relax her jaw, and heads to Union Station’s security room, flashing her badge to the guy who mans the door to gain access.

She asks him to call up the security cam footage of the last fifteen minutes, and as he does so, lays the whole story of Sam’s death out to Helena, who is silent for a long minute afterwards. 

“Myka, are you al-”

“Ma’am? This what you wanted?”

Myka is glad to divert her attention from the solicitousness in Helena’s eyes. She peruses the footage and nods. “That’s the crowd I saw, yes,” she murmurs, scanning for Bock’s face in it. He’s good with disguises, so it’s slow going, but eventually she sees him heading out the northeast entrance. 

Twenty minutes ago. 

He’s long gone now, slipped through her fingers once more. 

Her jaw is all tightened up again, and Myka can’t be bothered to make the effort to fight it. 

Helena sticks to the professional side of things as they try to track Bock down; gives good input, asks good questions, doesn’t give Myka that concerned kind of look again as if she knows that if she does, Myka will fly apart. 

Myka’s old team accepts her back in – not seamlessly; it’s been too long and they’re in other places now, but at least they listen and let her jump onto the case again. 

They figure out Bock’s back in town to get new blocks for counterfeiting money; they almost have him on a freaking tourist bus as it stops by the Mint, and then he’s _fucking gone again_ and Myka is hanging onto her self-control with every fiber of her being.

It’s then that Helena steps up and asks the even better questions. 

It’s then that Myka figures out there is an artifact in play. That there _was_ an artifact in play when Sam died. She opens the old files, and looks at them like a Warehouse agent, not a Secret Service agent, and certainly not like someone who was involved with the man who died on this case.

She’s only halfway successful with the latter, because one of the leads takes her right to Sam’s ex-wife’s door while Helena waits outside in the car. 

The conversation with Allison is supremely awkward. What else can it be when you walk up to the person your partner – not just Secret Service partner, but intimate partner – was still married to when you were… partners, and ask to see his personal effects? 

And yet when Allison says that Myka was proof that Sam had moved on, Myka hones in on the words ‘moved on’, and asks herself if Helena has moved on when she hasn’t; if they are in different places now, if that’s why things are so awkward between them. For a moment she forgets about Sam and Bock until Allison pulls her back to the present again when she tells Myka to get this guy.

Myka comes away from the conversation with conflicted feelings and a musical greeting card. Back in the car, she opens it and pulls a face as she hears the song; she always hated it and Sam knows it. Before she can say anything, though, she gets a call from her old team and they’re off again, hot on Leo Bock’s heels.

When they arrive, Helena wants to follow her in, and Myka isn’t having it. Helena isn’t trained – like Pete would be, a small voice inside her says before she shushes it – and while, yes, Helena knows Kenpo, she doesn’t know procedure. And Myka can’t lose someone else to this case; she can’t. 

Five minutes later, Leo Bock is dead, and Myka is confused as to how it happened. Her memory is impeccable, but as she talks the events over with Helena, who’d stormed in when she’d heard the shot that took Bock out, it seems that more happened in the blink of an eye than should have, and that’s when it hits her.

Artie confirms it – an artifact that stops time within a limited perimeter, allowing the bearer to keep moving while everything and everyone else is frozen in place and oblivious as to what’s happening. 

Forty-seven seconds. 

Myka wasn’t late when Sam died. 

They’d synched their watches, and she _knew_ she hadn’t been late, and now she knows why, she _fucking knows why_ and she almost loses it. But Leo Bock isn’t the guy to commit suicide by cop, and the whole thing stinks of a two-man operation rather than one man working alone. But Myka is stumped knowing who the other guy in the equation might be, or if it even is a guy. It could be anyone. 

She’s failed again. 

Allison told her to get the guy, and she got _one_ guy but there were two and she didn’t get the other one. So she’s failed. Again. 

She failed Sam, artifact or no, and he died, and now she failed his memory, the promise she’s made to Allison, to herself. Sam always had a backup, _Myka_ was his backup, she failed him and he died, she failed to solve the case again and his murderer might be dead but the other guy’s still out there. 

She’s just about ready to dump the whole thing into Helena’s hands, see what Helena can do about it.

And Helena _pep-talks_ her. 

Tells her to not separate emotions and rationale, but to consider both as parts of one whole. Myka wonders if she got that one from a therapist or a fortune cookie, but then it hits her – she _has_ always dismissed Sam’s and her private matters as inconsequential for the case, but what if they’re not? What if the other guy was someone from the office, and Sam had to resort to stuff outside the office to solve the whole thing? 

It’s a leap; of course it is, but at this point she’s ready to leap; she’d leap to the moon if it helped solve this case once and for all. It explains why today’s operation, known only to half a dozen people, went wrong. There are only two people who were part of both today’s operation and the one back then, and it’s awful to think these thoughts, but they have to be thought. Eyes and ears open, as Sam used to say. 

Ears. 

The card?

Myka rummages in Allison’s box until she finds it again. Opens it. Sits through the fucking car wash song for ten seconds and then-

She can’t make out if it’s Jim or Zach’s voice on the recording, talking to Leo, but she’s aflame now. She takes her anger at the betrayal and her sheer fucking _rage_ at artifacts, and tightens her focus like you’d tighten the nozzle on a Bunsen burner until you’re hot enough to melt steel. She doesn’t stop to think, barely slows down enough to let Helena tag along behind her because backup is important, and then Jim pulls out the barometer and a bullet is in the air headed straight for Helena and Myka doesn’t stop to think, just lets instinct take over, and at the end of forty-seven seconds the Barometer of the U.S.S. Eldridge is in her gloved hands and Jim is in the path of that goddamn bullet and Helena is out of danger and Myka stumbles outside and brings up the sandwich she had for lunch.

“Time travel will do that to one,” Helena says. She’s holding Myka’s hair back from her face in cool, calm hands. “Thank you, Myka, for saving my life yet again.”

Myka shakes her head and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Hands on her knees, she knows she’s swaying. “Didn’t save Sam,” she says thickly.

“Which was not your fault,” Helena points out. “You couldn’t have. But you made a change today, Myka. You solved the puzzle, you secured the artifact, you saved my life. No one will ever fall victim to the Barometer again, and _you_ brought that about.”

Myka considers this as her eyes roam the asphalt she so recently re-decorated. There’s another thing that’s been niggling at her, and now she takes another leap. “You knew, didn’t you.”

“That we were dealing with something that altered time?” Helena waits for Myka’s nod of confirmation, and when she gets it, goes on, “I had my suspicions, yes. Back in that first alleyway, to tell the truth. But your reaction was so very uncharacteristic – and I reasoned that perhaps you needed to find your own way through this.”

“You-” Myka is angry again. “You could have been killed!” she yells, pointing her hand at the building behind them. Her stomach is heaving again. “What kind of, of… fucking _game_ are you playing?”

“The game that is called ‘I trust Myka Bering’,” Helena says simply. “The person who trusted me to find my way back to her.”

Myka stares at her, straightening up. Stares at her for a full minute. Closes her eyes and runs a hand across her face. “I can’t deal with this,” she says. 

“Myka-” Helena is reaching out to her, and Myka backs away, both hands up at her shoulders. 

“Don’t,” she snaps. “Just… just don’t.” And she turns and walks away. She has no goal in mind; she just walks, trying to get as much distance between her and Helena Wells as she can. Finds herself in another alleyway after a while, finds a few orange crates and sits down on them, head propped into hands. 

Cries a bit, for Sam, for life not being fair, for trying to solve an unsolvable case for three years, for herself and what all of this did to her and still does. 

Maybe now she can move on from this. 

And maybe she needs to move on from Helena. Maybe it’s better to be co-workers, if they have to be anything, interact on a professional basis; rationale rather than emotion. 

Helena is a good agent, after all; that much is still true. She did well today, apart from that bit where she almost got herself killed because she wanted to let Myka figure this out for herself.

Myka snorts bitterly. So much for rationale, she thinks; so much for trying to not let pigheadedness get people killed.

Yeah, so some things are better learned when you learn them for yourself; that was part of the reason why she let Helena go, back then in Sydney, but this? Is taking things too far, surely. 

Then again, Myka hadn’t exactly planned long before heading in to confront Jim and Zach, or given Helena much opportunity to speak up and say that her plan was harebrained – which it had been, on hindsight. Impulsive, emotional, harebrained. 

But it had worked. She’d made it work. And she _had_ saved Helena’s life. 

When Myka walks out of the alley’s mouth, Helena is there, around the corner, waiting unobtrusively, but waiting nevertheless. Like a good partner does. 

Myka nods her chin at her. “Let’s go home,” she says.


	4. Chapter 4

They take a hotel in Denver’s outskirts rather than drive back that day. Neither one of them is up for another eight-hour drive. 

Myka feels drained, and Helena seems to recognize it, sparing her small talk – any talk, really – and taking charge of finding a hotel, booking them in, all that jazz. She gently pushes Myka towards the shower when they’re in the room, and Myka takes full advantage of not being in a building that has only so much hot water for six people. The bathroom is foggy when she leaves it, clad in her PJs even if it’s barely five. Helena heads in next, for a shower of her own, and a few minutes later there’s a knock on the door – room service, leaving a tray with two covered dishes and reminding Myka that food is, indeed, a thing. She is starving.

But she waits for Helena. 

There has to be a punchline somewhere in there. 

Dinner, it turns out, is a full English breakfast and a tofu scramble. Myka has no idea how much Helena had to bribe the kitchen with to make this happen, and no idea what to make of the gesture. Is this a callback? Just Helena ordering something she knows Myka will eat? 

She’s too tired for games. She just re-lived Sam’s death; all she wants is some peace and quiet and sleep, damn it. 

Helena doesn’t say much throughout dinner. Myka both wants and doesn’t want to speak with her; the silence between them is fraught with a million unspoken words, but at the same time, Sam hangs over everything and it just _really_ doesn’t feel right. 

Helena does make one attempt and says, “If you have need to talk, about anything, I am here,” after dinner and halfway across the room. 

Myka figures that if Helena makes the effort, she can do the same. “There are a few things I want to talk about, yes,” she says, “but I can’t right now.” She feels like a sweater with a loose stitch – pull a string anywhere and she’s going to unravel.

Helena nods, and that’s that for the night.

The morning has them facing an eight-hour road trip, with both of them awake, caffeinated, and no more excuses whatsoever. 

Myka drives first; Helena behind the wheel in city traffic is a bad idea. Myka also speaks first. “I’m sorry for being so impulsive yesterday,” she says. “I didn’t stop to think, and that nearly got you killed.” She figures it’s good to lead with that. It’s been weighing on her mind.

Helena nods. “Accepted,” she says. “It did serve as a good reminder that retrievals, even benign-seeming one, can turn on a moment’s notice. I’m glad you had my back.”

Good words, good talk. But not the point. Myka tries to get to said point from a different avenue. “You said something about re-instatement. About taking this as a test run.”

Helena nods again. “Yes. And as it happens, I wanted to talk about the matter with you first, Myka.”

Myka wrinkles her brows as she merges onto the interstate and heads west towards I-25. “Me? Why?”

“Because this Warehouse is your place,” Helena says calmly, “as much as Warehouse 12 was mine. And if for some reason you find you can’t or won’t work with me, then I’ll simply find employ elsewhere.”

Can’t or won’t work with-? Myka’s frown deepens. “What do you mean, ‘elsewhere’? You said you had no tether in this time other than the Warehouse, so where would you go? And why would _I_ want that?” she asks. “I told you you were a good agent, and I haven’t changed my opinion.”

“Myka, please,” Helena says. “I know you’re not obtuse. I know, we both know, that… that there was something between us. You know I would never have let anyone else stop me; I know you would never have sprung anyone else out of jail.”

“And we both know that all that was over a year ago.” It still hurts; it hurts again, that Myka has no idea, _none,_ what happened in that year. What Helena had done, how she’d found herself in Wales – no idea whatsoever. 

They’re coming up on the intersection that connects I-70 to I-25, and Myka has the choice to head south or north, home – or home. Colorado Springs, or Univille. She breathes a soft laugh at herself and merges onto the northbound lane. Her parents’ place has stopped being home long ago. 

“Would you like to know what happened?” Helena offers.

“I would like to know where we stand,” Myka replies. 

“We stand in a very different place than we did in Sydney. And…” Helena stops, takes a breath. Myka chances a quick glance over and sees conflict in dark brown eyes, nerves in taut lines and anxiety in the planes of the face she knows well enough to name all those emotions. “I would hope that from that different place we still have a way open to go forward,” Helena says, quiet enough to be almost swallowed by car noise. “I should very much like to.”

Myka ponders that. “Different how?” 

“Different in that I know, now, that I can be without a tether to the Warehouse and still remain a good person. That I don’t need it to remain a good person. Different in that now, my returning is a true choice, instead of the only alternative. That is one of the things I needed to find out, and make certain of.”

“Alright, I get that, but-”

“And by the same token,” Helena goes on, “I needed to find out if I could be without you.”

Myka’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel. She wishes she could look at Helena for more than just a stolen glance on a highway. What does she mean, be without her?

“I needed to know,” Helena says, softly, gently, “what my feelings for you meant for me.”

Is this how Victorians used to break up with one another? It doesn’t sound like it, but what does Myka know? And now she has to focus to navigate road works and a three-lane-to-one-lane merge. Helena is blessedly silent while Myka does so, but that also means Myka has to wait to learn more, and that has never been easy for her.

“Myka, I know you loved me,” Helena goes on after they’re through the obstruction and traffic flows freely again, and Myka’s stomach drops. She’s never told Helena – in words anyway. Okay, yeah, so freeing someone from jail might be something of a giveaway, but… but weren’t Victorians supposed to be circumspect in these matters? Also, past tense. _Past tense!_ What- “And I love you as well,” is what Helena says next, and while a year and a bit ago, Myka would have sung to hear these words, now they fill her with dread. “However,” and, fuck, isn’t that just the most awful word to follow a declaration of love? “Loving you is, has become, part of my bedrock,” Helena continues. “It is part of me, but I needed to see that it isn’t the sole definition of who I am; not the sole motivation for me to do what I do. And beyond that, I needed to learn who I was, what I could offer you, so that anything that springs from these feelings is a true choice, too, instead of something for which neither of us has an alternative.” Helena is quiet for a moment, and when Myka steals another glance, she sees she’s biting her lip. “I… do not know if you have moved on from how you felt back then,” she says hesitantly. “I might be making the biggest fool of myself that ever lived-”

“You’re not,” Myka says. She can’t help but interrupt; Helena has spoken about what she needed, and Helena needs to hear this. “I haven’t. I think. But you’re right,” she says, and until she says it, she hadn’t known, but now it’s like something clicked, like they were driving through a tunnel and suddenly they’re back in the open and everything is clear. “You’re right; we aren’t in that place anymore. You’ve changed. I mean, obviously, that was the whole point,” she adds quickly, “but I think… I think I wasn’t aware of what kind of scope it would take, not really, until you reappeared. When I saw you standing in that archway, I thought you looked different, and now I know why. You’re not…” she shrugs, trying to find the right words. “You’re not tentative anymore?” she tries, and it sounds close enough. “Now you’re someone who knows what they have to offer.”

“Precisely,” Helena says, her voice alive with excitement and her hand close to Myka’s arm before she remembers – and the way she stops herself warms Myka’s heart – that Myka doesn’t like touches while driving; it’s unsafe. “Precisely, Myka,” she repeats, hands clasped in her lap now. “That is what I sought to find, needed to find, and have found. I needed to be sure enough of myself, my place _now_ , in _this_ century, that if my offer – either of them – were rescinded, I could walk away and not be destroyed.”

“And I take it you are, then? Sure of that? I mean you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. Right?” There’s an exit coming up, and Myka makes her way to the right-most lane; she needs to stop, if only for a moment, and face Helena. She pulls off the highway and into an Arby’s parking lot, puts the car in park and turns towards the passenger seat. “That’s what this means, yeah?” Because if it doesn’t, she’s gonna… she’s gonna leave this car and scream. 

Talk about emotional rollercoasters.

Helena nods. Once, tersely, an abrupt motion completely unlike how she usually moves. “Doesn’t mean I’m not worried whether you are… amenable,” she admits, with a quick, dry roll of her eyes, and suddenly, Myka’s heart overflows and she surges forwards to kiss Helena. 

She cradles Helena’s face, and Helena’s hands are at her wrists first, then in her hair, at her neck and shoulder, pulling Myka into her as she deepens the kiss with an urgent sound in the back of her throat. When they leave off each other, Helena’s eyes are shining with wetness, and her smile is tremulous. “I take it you are, then?” she echoes Myka’s previous question. 

Myka exhales a soft laugh, dropping her hands from Helena’s face and catching her fingers instead. “Amenable to you returning, as far as that is my call to make? Yes. Amenable to this?” She gestures between them. “Yes. But, and please, I know this is a god-awful word to hear in such a moment, but let me explain, okay?”

Helena nods, face no longer smiling and only tremulous now. 

“You’ve changed,” Myka goes on, “you’ve said it yourself. And maybe I’ve changed too, I don’t know. Maybe we _should_ … get to know each other again. Not start over, but…” Myka frowns, then shrugs. “Or maybe yes start over. I mean you did upend everything I thought I knew about you, when you pulled that Tesla on me and disappeared. So… so maybe you need to let me come to you, this time.” She squeezes Helena’s hands. “But I want to do that. I mean I’m nervous as hell, not just because,” she jabs her thumb behind them, indicating Denver and Sam, “but because I’ve never felt as much at home anywhere as I do there,” she points north and east to where, a good seven hours ahead, Leena’s B&B awaits, “and _you’ll_ be there too and the last thing I want is to mess that up. Seriously, when I realized that Pete was to be my partner, I was _glad_ because I knew I wouldn’t get into the same kind of mess I did with Sam, and now I’m… prepared to jump right back in again.”

“Then perhaps it-” Helena swallows, clears her throat. “Perhaps it is better if we do not attempt this? Remain friends instead?”

Myka shakes her head decisively, immediately. “I want to at least try,” she says. “The status quo, the safe bet… they can leave you content, but they don’t make you happy.”

This startles a smile out of Helena. “You _have_ changed,” she says. 

“Yeah, well, sometimes people can surprise you,” Myka shrugs with a smile of her own. “Might have something to do with deciding to completely break all of the rules I’ve ever set for myself, and coming out unharmed on the other side of it.”

The look Helena gives her in reply to that is pensive. Then she nods, lifts Myka’s hands up, and presses a kiss on each set of knuckles. “Courtship it is, then.” Then she tilts her head, eyes suddenly nervous. “That is what you were talking about, yes? Surely we’re not going further back than that.”

“It’s called dating these days,” Myka says, “and yes, that is what I’m talking about.” Although, she thinks to herself, calling it ‘courtship’ feels… it stirs something in her. Helena might have found her place in the twenty-first century, but she _was_ born in 1866; that is part of who she is. “You know what? Let’s stick with ‘courtship’,” she grins at Helena. “I mean our timeline is all over the place anyway.”

Helena smiles back at her – no, that’s not a smile, that is her _smirk_ , that little tilt at the corners that is so utterly and irrefutably Helena. “Righty-ho, then,” she tells Myka, and in their clasped fingers, Myka can feel the twitch of Helena’s right hand as Helena does not give her a jaunty salute. 

Myka laughs and lets go. If they want to make it to Univille before the sun is down, they better get a move on.


	5. Chapter 5

Myka doesn’t know how fast courtships used to move, but in terms of dating, they’re going slow. Helena seems content to let Myka set the pace, and while Myka knows what she wants, it is a fact that they’re not the same people who stood in a cell in Cuba and on a pier in Brighton, who sat on a beach in Okinawa and a sand dune in Tunisia and in a café in Sydney. She doesn’t want this getting-to-know-you to take another year, but she also doesn’t want to rush things, and she’s happy that Helena isn’t pushing her. 

A few days after Denver, she learns that Helena watches Doctor Who, religiously enough to install a VPN and fool the BBC. Myka gets invited, and then learns that Helena has a friend in the UK – “Cardiff, as chance would have it,” – who watches as well, and that Helena is on the phone with said friend throughout the episode. That night, the friend is on speaker phone so that Myka can hear her comments too, and can’t help feeling like an intruder.

Ida’s comments are spot-on, and Ida herself sounds friendly, and what Myka feels about that is absolutely not jealousy. 

“So, Myka,” Ida says when the episode is over. “Helena tells me you’re a co-worker?”

“Not just _a_ co-worker,” Helena adds, and she is _blushing_.

Myka’s jaw drops at the same time as Ida hoots. 

“Goodness,” Ida exclaims, “and here you are calling _me?_ Go be with _her_ , you numbskull!” And she hangs up.

Maybe Ida is alright. And surely Helena is allowed to have friends – no: her having friends is _good_. 

Helena is still blushing when she turns to Myka. “Well, that did not go as expected,” she says. “We used to talk about the episode, sometimes far into the night. She gave me a job,” she elaborates, and Myka tries very hard not to show how curious she is all of a sudden. “Took a chance on me, a perfect stranger, with not a single credential to my name.”

Myka gives up on the whole ‘don’t show curiosity’ thing. “What did you do?” 

“I was a community helper,” Helena explains. “Fixed a door on my first day, minded infant twins so that the mother could take a few breaths of her own, clipped an old lady’s toenails. Small things for people on the verge of falling through the cracks, or sometimes a bit past that. Humble work, but work I could do. Work that had value.”

Myka nods and smiles to herself. Community work as an alternative to incarceration – there was a certain poetic sense to that for a would-be megalomaniac civilization-ender. “That was in Wales, then?”

Helena nods. “Cardiff.” She tilts her chin at the laptop they watched the episode on. “Some episodes of the show were shot there, you know.”

Myka knows indeed, but that’s not what she’s interested in. “And Ida was your boss?”

“Indeed,” Helena says. “She did the same things I did, plus the parts that required the correct educational background. Counseling, advocating in court, lobbying to get an actual community center going. I had very little to contribute there, so I did my best with what I could do.” She looks down at her knees for a moment. “Sometimes I do wonder if I wasn’t just as much of a client as everyone else,” she says, “for all that I drew wages. She pulled me out of myself, befriended me, helped me regain my sense of who I was.”

Myka tries very hard, again, not to be jealous. In her head, Ida is gorgeous, self-assured, a strong, capable woman in her prime; taking on community cases and courts and politicians alike and winning every battle. 

“Here, this is her, when we went to the seashore proper one day,” Helena says, digging through her purse for her wallet and taking out a picture. 

Myka is reluctant to take it, and then shakes herself out of it and reaches for the photo.

Two women are leaning against cast-iron rails, the sea behind them. The photo isn’t a close-up; Myka can see enough of both women’s body language to know that they are friends, nothing more. Ida is easily fifty, perhaps pushing sixty, although strong and capable still apply. Not what Myka might call gorgeous, but she has a kind smile. Myka feels sheepish as she hands the photo back. 

“And you told her about me?” she asks instead.

“I told her about everything,” Helena replies, and Myka’s jaw slackens again. “I needed to be able to confide in someone outside of the Warehouse; that’s what the One is for, after all. I needed someone to talk things over with, to give me an idea of normalcy. The work I was doing alongside her grounded me, as you say these days. And that was true enough, but it seemed so far removed of things in the Warehouse that I might as well have been living on a different planet. I needed to reconcile those two worlds. So one night I told her.”

“And she believed you?”

“Not at first,” Helena admits with a chuckle. “But I did manage to snag an artifact; a letter opener that caused everyone who used it to speak fluent Greek.”

“I logged that in,” Myka said, eyes round. “Artie said Mrs. Frederic had dropped it in the inbox.”

“Oh, Mrs. Frederic knew where I was alright,” Helena says, a bit acerbically now. “Who do you think gave me a passport to leave Australia?”

“She _knew?”_

Helena nods tightly. “Not from the beginning, I don’t think. We never spoke much; she never said anything about the whole matter – except to leave the Regents to her.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say to this. Had Mrs. Frederic been on Helena’s side?

“She did argue in my favor, you know,” Helena says, contemplative now. “At my trial. Rehabilitation over incarceration, along those lines. I knew she’d be overruled, but it was nice to hear anyway; not that I was in a very receptive mood. But I did remember it, later, when she approached me in Australia.”

“So she… you think she…”

“Gave me that chance, probably against the Regents’ wishes?” Helena nods. “Yes. She also pleaded my case again this time, when I asked to return. You don’t think I was allowed to come here straight away? There was a full-blown hearing to determine the veracity of my claim to a change of heart.”

Myka berates herself for not thinking of that. “Of course there was,” she says. “And you convinced them.”

Helena smiles. “I did. I think at least one Regent also spoke with Ida. A character witness, if you will. They might approach you, too.”

“Which is why you asked me, on our way back from Denver, if I was okay with you coming back.”

“Partly,” Helena says, and her smile persists. “I also wanted to know for my own sake.”

Myka feels warm at that admission. 

-_-_-

They catch Doctor Who whenever they can, and more often than not, Ida joins them on speaker phone. Helena gets paired up on retrievals with Pete, Steve, Claudia, even Artie, and Myka is questioned by the Regents about their mission to Denver in excruciating detail. She is indeed asked if she approves of Helena’s return, and firmly answers in the affirmative. 

They go out for dinner that night. 

Since summer is waning and the heat isn’t all that oppressive anymore, they also take walks, arm in arm like Helena had been in that photo with Ida, but markedly closer together, Myka can’t help but notice. They speak of many a thing, and sometimes of nothing at all. 

Helena is calmer now, a lot less driven, a lot more patient. Less jittery, less manic; at times she seems content, even. Not just when it comes to the two of them, but in general. Yes, she still works through the night when she gets an idea, but her energy when she does so is less feverish and more fascinated. She speaks differently of her past, too; her voice is still full of grief, but there is acceptance in it too, as well as in her eyes. She tells Myka, on one of their walks, how she told Ida about having lost Christina, and how Ida told her in turn that she had lost her barely teenaged son to suicide over bullying. 

“So many lost loved ones,” Helena says as the B&B comes back into sight. “So many of the people Ida and I worked with had someone to mourn. Sometimes it was oppressive to be around their varied flavors and shades of mourning; at other times it put my feelings into a new perspective: I wasn’t alone to grieve. Who was I to think that my grief was anything special? Why should I get my child back and not Ida hers? How presumptuous of me to believe that my grief was somehow more important than that of anyone who had ever lost someone they’d loved.” She stops and palms her locket, looking unseeingly at Leena’s garden. “Making the rounds with Ida Morgan put a fresh perspective on a lot of things. Humbling, like I said before.”

Myka nods. 

She likes this new Helena. 

And with that realization comes a feeling of things hanging in a very tender balance. 

Helena has made it clear that she’s willing to abide by however fast Myka chooses to go on. Has made it clear that how this proceeds is Myka’s call. 

And it’s a call Myka finds herself reluctant to take, what with all the what ifs. Yes, this is the status quo, and not the status quo that she ultimately wants – but it’s still a new status quo, relatively speaking, and maybe it’s a bit too early yet to rush to the next one.

The two of them go on another retrieval together, and then on one where Pete joins them, and things work so smoothly even on the second one that Myka feels like swooning. 

Talk between them flows effortlessly, regardless of what they’re talking about. 

One night in October, they’re all together at the B&B, sitting around the dining room table swapping tall tales of Halloween past. Myka excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when she comes back she sees it again, just like on the day Helena came back: she sees Helena laugh, out loud and with her head thrown back, and this time Myka isn’t jealous; this time it doesn’t make her angry.

This time it feels _right_. This time her heart opens wide, and what bursts from it is love, and want, and amazement.

 _I will trust myself to make good decisions._  
  
She almost laughs as she remembers writing that line down, in a hotel room in Sioux Falls. She hasn’t thought about it in days, weeks, if not months.

She knows, by now, that the little piece of paper, no longer balled up but folded flat, resides in Helena’s locket. She can feel good about that. She does feel good about that. She’d wanted to help but hadn’t known how, and still she had helped anyway. But by now, they have both grown beyond that little piece of paper. Neither of them needs it anymore; it’s a keepsake, nothing more.

Alright, it is a reminder that without her, without that day where Myka decided to throw all of her rules out of the airlock except for the ones she wrote down, Helena wouldn’t be sitting here.

But: without the work Helena did on herself in the year and a half she was away, Helena wouldn’t be sitting here either.

And as Helena’s lips come together again after she stops laughing, as they form that smile, that _smirk_ , form words to regale the table with, Myka remembers how it feels to have these lips touch her own, to feel the hands that are now shaping illustrations to Helena’s story glide across her face instead, to feel Helena’s body shape itself to hers. 

And she wants. Wants with a brilliance that should, by rights, light up the space around her.

Helena looks up to see Myka standing in the doorway, and her expression changes, from animated to soft in an instant, as if someone had put a filter over a picture of her face.

Myka sucks in her lips and bites them for a moment, then, deliberately and while holding Helena’s gaze, tilts her head backwards towards the stairs in silent invitation. 

Helena gets up from the table immediately. 

The stairs are dark and quiet compared to the dining room, and Myka pulls Helena halfway up, to where the moon casts light through a window. She doesn’t want to do this in the dark.

She takes Helena’s hands, weaves their fingers together. Standing on socked feet as they both are, Helena is a couple of inches shorter than Myka; something she usually makes up for with boots or boisterousness; something that is clearly apparent right now. 

“I would like to kiss you,” Myka says, feeling artless and inarticulate, but then she isn’t the wordsmith, is she.

“Are you certain?” Helena asks, just as simply. 

Myka laughs, only the once. “No,” she says pointedly, and amends, “not one hundred percent, anyway. But unless I do this, I’ll never _be_ certain.”

“That is certainly true.” 

This is not the kiss they shared in Tunisia, nor the one they shared in an Arby’s parking lot. No hands on anyone’s cheeks, this time; their arms hang loosely at their sides, fingers still intertwined, as Myka leans in. Helena tilts her face to accommodate her, and then their lips touch.

It is almost chaste, despite the fact that Helena’s mouth is slightly open.

It is tentative, hesitant, and Myka’s heart beats in her throat because this is the most deliberate she’s ever been. 

Helena has found her way back here; they have found their way back to each other. Something that began with lie upon lie upon lie now blooms into truth between them. 

Myka’s fingers slip from between Helena’s and wrap around her hips instead, closing the distance between them. As if Helena has waited for that sign – and Myka is sure this is exactly what Helena has been doing – she runs her hands up Myka’s back and tangles her fingers in the curls at the nape of Myka’s neck. 

Not all that chaste anymore, now. 

But chaste isn’t what Myka wants. She flicks her tongue out, darts it just in between Helena’s lips, and the moan that Helena gives at that – _that_ is what Myka wants. 

She is certain now.


End file.
